<p>basically talks about how college kids are not learning much. On the contrary, it seems that many are doing worse on this exam after college than before college.</p>
<p>Majors that are listed in the article that showed hardly any improvements (if at all) were: business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health</p>
<p>What's the deal with that? From a computer science major, I'm genuinely confused. I've worked my butt off in a tough computer science program, and definitely feel like I've gotten considerably smarter and better at problem solving. </p>
<p>One suspicion I have is that the test mainly focuses on reading/writing skills. It would make some sense that these skills wouldn't improve for engineers given the lack of writing classes.</p>
<p>From personal experience I feel like a much smarter person, and overall a much better human being and citizen than before I started college. My writing skills have increased dramatically, my ability to critically analyze others’ writings is much better, I am not nearly as fooled by statistics as I used to be, I feel I have a deeper understanding of economic and political history, and I now have a moral and logical grouding that I did not have before thanks to my philosophy classes.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t pay much attention to the study. It only matters what YOU do with your education. I agree with Inmotion12 - college definitely made me smarter! It also made me realize I wasn’t as smart as I thought when I went in!</p>
<p>This would definitely apply to me. I pretty much gained admission to colleges based on my math and science grades and not my English composition grades. Add on top of that, my high-school (when I look back) did not prepare me well in English composition. My high-school emphasized bigger words and vocabulary and not practical writing as freshman English professors would say “get to the point” on my papers. It seems like most of what I know about writing came from college and not high-school, so college definitely helped me in writing.</p>
<p>I question both the test used and the general applicability of a single standard to students in all majors. While I like some of points he makes about the purpose of college, this seems all just a little too simple.</p>
<p>To really test this, you would need to establish standards pertaining to the general educational requirements of universities, and test it at 1-year intervals - this would allow you to establish a baseline and see how students progress through different majors. For example, hard-science types only have 1-2 years of general coursework, arts and humanities have 3-4 years. Then compare the results with subjects who did not attend college at all and see what the differences are. It may be that the “worst case” business students, themselves only holding steady, are still doing better than a control group who see such skills decay over four years without intellectual stimulation.</p>
<p>Arts and humanities students are much more likely to be lacking in coursework in science than science students are likely to be lacking in coursework in humanities.</p>
<p>I am talking about coursework designed for breadth of knowledge rather than depth, including but not limited to general education requirements for all majors, plus (at least at my school) additional requirements that all BA recipients have to fulfill. Another definition would be that coursework not unique (or nearly so) to your major. I know it is nebulous and hard to define, but if you want to test everyone on the same criteria then you need to focus on the common material.</p>
<p>At my alma mater at least, BA students received so much breadth of education that their actual major courses were often limited to a single year or even (in a few cases) a semester. Consider the example of economics - at PSU, a BA in economics takes 120 credits, of which only 36 are prescribed, while the BS (also 120 credits) prescribes 55 credits. For Math, a BA prescribes 56 credits while the BS prescribes 80-90 depending on the option.</p>
<p>I think the guy said it best when he said that majors like business and engineering are more vocational than arts and social science. If the CLA only consists of essay questions pertaining to “how our global society operates,” and “how one person impacts society as a whole,” I already know I would flunk the test. If I even managed to come up with something to say, chances are, they wouldn’t like what I have to say and fail me on principle. On the other hand, give me a test on the dynamics of a vehicle design, or how an internal combustion engine would perform under certain conditions, and I would kick ass.</p>
<p>Hmmm, at Berkeley, bachelor’s degree majors require approximately the following numbers of units out of 120 to graduate:</p>
<p>Economics: 48 to 56
English: 48
History: 49
Integrative Biology: 58
Math: 52
Molecular and Cell Biology: 75
Physics: 58
Political Science: 48</p>
<p>Molecular and Cell Biology is the outlier in terms of course requirement volume among this selection of majors in Berkeley’s College of Letters and Science, although it is the single most popular undergraduate major. But most of the others in various fields have similar numbers of required units of major courses. (Of course, one can argue that those majors that include lab science courses involve more work per unit than other majors.)</p>
<p>However, if a test involved asking basic physics questions like “describe the relationship between location, velocity, and acceleration”, or “explain why a 95 pound person who can deadlift 90 pounds cannot loosen the overtightened lug nuts on his/her car to change a flat tire”, how many of the arts and humanities majors would be able to answer them, compared to engineering majors? Or basic personal finance questions like “explain why a tax deferred retirement account invested in something that grows in a normally-taxable way may result in keeping more money at the end than the same investment in a fully taxable account”.</p>